"“Ruined Cities in Cyprus”: How a Three-Hundred-Word Letter Kick-Started the Preservation of Cyprus’s Medieval Structures." (original) (raw)
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The Many Face(t)s of Cyprus - 14th Meeting of Postgraduate Cypriot Archaeology, 2019
In the late nineteenth century, the British undertaking of the administration of Cyprus brought along with it the principal ideas of the British Empire. Fundamentally against any expressions of the former, and in their opinion anachronistic and inferior Ottoman rule, the British made it their mission to restore Cyprus after its three hundred year’s ‘sleep’ by re-establishing the island’s medieval glory, which was conveniently associated with Western European powers. This was expressed through the repairs to medieval sites and buildings. Using the works to the Gothic cathedral of Famagusta as a case study, this paper will trace how the British ideology and the British conservation theory practically shaped aspects of the island’s built cultural heritage. Reused and modified throughout the Ottoman rule, the cathedral of Saint Nicholas of Famagusta had disagreeable Ottoman associations to the British eyes that required immediate elimination. But despite the outcry not only of foreign scholars but also of the British public opinion, it was still being used as a mosque by the local Muslim population; a complicated and unique situation for the British Empire that called for an original solution. With the British attempting to prevail over the remains of the Ottoman rule, driven by the strong ideology of Orientalism, the appointed architect attempting to implement the principles of the Society of the Protection of Ancient Monuments, and the cathedral under Ottoman ownership, the fate and state of a monument that we take for granted today, was anything but self-evident.
Cahiers du Centre d’Études Chypriotes, 2024
In 1899 Camille Enlart’s book L’art gothique et la Renaissance en Chypre was published. In its two volumes, it provided the first thorough study of Cyprus’s Gothic structures and placed them in the context of French architectural history. While the book remains an established reference for scholars of Gothic architecture, its connection to the preservation of Cyprus’s medieval monuments has not been fully explored. This article studies the book’s role during the emergence of the interest for medieval monuments in the beginning of the twentieth century, and examines its continuous role as a catalogue for the selection of structures to be placed under the auspices of the island’s antiquities laws. Drawing from archival sources within the Cyprus State Archives, the National Archives of the UK, and the Archive of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, it seeks to establish the book’s continuous involvement in the creation of Cyprus’s medieval built heritage.
The genesis of hybrid architectural preservation practices in British colonial Cyprus
Architectural Research Quarterly
Colonisation initiated the transfer of Western ideas about both heritage discourses and conservation understandings into the non-Western world. The process turned colonised territories into domains where developing heritage views in metropolitan countries were put into practice. Coinciding with the evolution of heritage discourses and modern architectural conservation movements in the West, the British colonial era (1878-1960) in Cyprus became a period where the importation of knowledge introduced new ways of thinking about the treatment of ancient buildings. Based on archival sources, this paper sheds light on the genesis of modern understandings of architectural conservation in Cyprus during the early colonial period (1878-1905), which established the foundations that future practice would be built on. An historical account of the early conservation activities at the key Gothic cathedral-mosques is presented, which illustrates the role of the medievalist conservation ethos importe...